“It’s my theory that only the unhappy, the uncomfortable, the gauche, the badly put together, aspire to make art. Why would you seek to reshape the world unless you were ill-at-ease in it? And I came out of the womb in every sense the wrong way round.” In the year of his 80th birthday the writer explores belonging and not-belonging, being an insider and an outsider, both English and Jewish, with Toby Lichtig, Fiction and Politics Editor at the Times Literary Supplement.

Howard Jacobson has written 16 novels and five works of non-fiction. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question.